… random observations from my journeys through a well-lived life

May 26, 2014 – Slurp & Lick

Posted on May 2, 2014

Food=fun. Therein lies the danger. Then again, maybe I could build a book of short stories around the pleasures one can have playing with food. It doesn’t take much to spark my imagination, especially when my belly is rumbling. Now there’s an inspiration that not many would use – hunger. But this is no game…it’s for real, as the kids say.

The whole food-porn shtick works in magazines and advertisements for alcohol. It worked in the movie Tom Jones. Yikes. Back when I first saw this scene in 1963, I was a 17 year old convent-school girl who didn’t know much about sensuality besides some furtive groping in the back seat of a borrowed automobile. Watching the ‘submarine races’ by Lock 1 of the Welland Canal in St. Catharines. On a Friday or Saturday night, there’d be cars lined up at discreet distances from one another, the windows all steamed up, a bit of rocking here and there, a flash of brake lights as someone’s foot slipped.

Dad’s car. Stop at A&W for sustenance beforehand. A Papaburger or Teenburger with onion rings, milkshake or root beer and fries. The wait staff roller-skates out to the car to take and deliver your orders. In those days (the mid-60s, before mega-sizing and double-downs), we didn’t worry much about our breath or our waistlines. Dammit, we walked everywhere. Miles and miles a day, and that’s not counting being in drum corps and marching. We were healthy and hungry for life and for late-night snacks.

Bucket seats. What a gawdawful invention. Maybe they are the root of my back issues today. Trying to keep some clothing on just in case. Goodness, but we had gradations of venial sins to disclose: necking, hickeys (love bites); petting – over the clothing, under the clothing but over the underwear, skin-to-skin. How the priests must have gotten bored (or aroused) at our regular litanies of simple ‘sins’ that were nothing more than youthful explorations.

I worked in the movie theatre and got to see this dozens of times. It made me swoon – as dumb and inexperienced as I was. Check out how imagery is used – the slurping, the candle in her hand as she plays hard to get. Listen carefully as you watch. Hot, hot, hot.